After Yesterday's Crash: The Avant-Pop Anthology

by Larry McCaffery

Book Overview

Some of the hottest writers of the 90's shared a subversive aesthetic sensibility, "avant-pop," that drew on the forms, images, slogans, characters, and narrative archetypes of our multidimensional, information-dense culture--cartoons, films, music videos, advertising, and rock music--to explore and critically examine that culture. Each of these thirty-two works delves into the deeper metaphorical implications of this pop cultural imagery to convey a turn toward overstimulation and hyper-consumption in American life, and to explore issues of personality and identity. This provocative, stylistically experimental work is truly literature for the twenty-first century.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0140240853
• ISBN13: 9780140240856
• Release Date: August 1995
• Publisher: Penguin Books
• Length: 384 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.0" x 7.8"

Customer Reviews

An mixed, but rewarding anthology

If you are not familar with the such jargon as "bleeding edge" or "indie avant-garde" then perhaps you've missed the "avant-pop" movement. As a movement, it seems to take where the Beats left off --Burrough's transgressive streaks meet an eye for pop culture--and also seem to merge pop culture with European aesthetic movements such as dada and situationalism. This anthology is dominated by cyberpunk and the younger generation of post-modernsts of the 1970's and 1980's. As another reviewer mentioned, there are several key authors missing, such as the late Kathey Acker. There is, of course, some very strong work by Don DeLillo, Willaim T. Vollmann, Robert Coovern and Paul Auster. These are also the tamer works that seem to work because they take risks while remaining lyrically smooth. There are several weak stories by good writers such as Bret Easton Ellis and the normally amazing David Foster Wallace. Some of the pictoral/film work does not really transfer well to this medium. I would also just skim the introduction by Larry McCaffery, which is worth while for the quotes and little else.

Crazy and wild

This is a collection of stories and fiction excerpts from that sensibility defined as "Avant-Pop." I am not sure if it truly exists. It is supposed to be a mixture of high and low culture with an emphasis on pop imagery and hyper-consumption. A sort of loose category. Cyberpunk and post-moderns dominate in this collection, though Thomas Pynchon, Kathy ACker, and John Shirley are mistakeningly absent here. Yet they too are at least mentioned in the lengthy and overblown introduction by Larry McCaffery, which reads like a combination of Baudrillard leftovers and PBS post-modernism. It's a shame that the introduction is longer than some of the excerpts. Some of the stronger works here are by Rikki Ducornet, Paul Auster, William Vollmann, Lynne Tillman, Steve Erickson, Eurydice, and Bret Easton Ellis. Some of the visual artists like David Blair, Craig Baldwin, and Derek Pell are limited by the textual space; film always seems corrupted by textual translations. Some pieces, like David Foster Wallace's "Tri-Stan: I Sold Sissee Nar To Ecko" read like total nonsense. Other writers who are a continuation of Modernism seem out of place, but Robert Coover, Ron Sukenick, and Raymond Federman do stand out mainly due to their elegant styles. It's odd that Bret Ellis' "End of teh 1980s," from the novel American Psycho, strikes an important note with a human portrayal of someone trapped in the Society of The Spectacle in this context. Other stroies here seem quite comfortable in the info-babble of our overwrought times. Definitely an intense reading experience nonetheless.

avant-pop is the underground's dream.

It was simply brilliant. It brings out the aethethics that you would find in an independant film while swallowing your emotions whole. I, personnally, found it very sensual and exotic in a wretched-suberbia way.